Virginia History

Poplar Springs Manor History

The origins of Poplar Springs predate the era of the American Revolution. However, it was not until the late 1920s that Poplar Springs as we see it today was constructed. Prominent lawyer Robert Randolph Hicks and his bride, Rose Beatrice Sutton, are credited with building what is now the Manor House. Designed to resemble 16th– and 17th-century European architecture, its primary construction utilized fieldstone located on the property, which is believed to have originated from the fireplaces of Civil War Union camps.

Vineyards on the 172 acre property. The first installation of nearly 1000 Traminette vines took place on Saturday, May 27, 2017.

Poplar Springs, like its neighboring farms The Grove and Eastern View, is on land once used by American Indian tribes. Some of those tribes may have been Siouan people known as the Manahoacs who were identified in the Rappahannock river drainage area by Captain John Smith in 1608. The Manahoacs merged with other Siouan people, the Monacans whose descendants still live in Amherst County, Virginia today. Indian spear points that may be as much as 10,000 years old have been found at Poplar Springs. In the seventeenth century, small numbers of buffalo also roamed in Virginia and a few may have been in this region as well. Some accounts say that Route 602, known as Rogues Road, and a major boundary of Poplar Springs was an old Indian Trail.

After English settlers came to Virginia, Fauquier County became a proprietorship and, by the eighteenth century, Indians no longer could be found in the area. Although the farm is now made up of a 200 acre parcel, originally it was part of a 10,000 acre tract extending from Midland to Casanova and owned (through a land grant from the English King at the time) by Robert “King” Carter. Before he died in 1732, “King” Carter gave some of the land to his grandson, Charles Carter, who sold just under 2000 acres to his son-in-law, Colonel Robert Randolph.